


hiraeth

by graveyardroses



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, M/M, Other, Thoschei, academy era doctor who, academy era thoschei
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26399230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graveyardroses/pseuds/graveyardroses
Summary: the Master wakes up on an unknown planet with nothing but his TARDIS locating device. He steals a ship, and then another one - going towards someplace he does not know, nothing keeping him in this universe. He then begins his journey, and in the rare moments where he falls asleep, he remembers.He remembers everything.Or: shitty capitalism, childhood yearning, and an old bridge in Scotland.
Relationships: The Doctor (Academy Era)/The Master (Academy Era)/The Rani (Academy Era), The Doctor | Theta Sigma/The Master | Koschei (Doctor Who: Academy Era), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	hiraeth

**awake  
** I wake up covered in dirt, mouth soaked with blood.  
My lips are cracked and dry, and my limbs ache with a soreness that could only come from a fight.  
I bring myself up, and stand, balancing on a tree. The bark is soft, and I rip it off, drying red-dripping hands on the wood.   
The pulp is green, and I taste the air. Fairly decent atmosphere. One of the alpha centauri planets. I pull out the tardis homing device. Eight beats per second. A trail appears on the half-cracked screen. 

The woods are dense, and I stumble through the undergrowth, coughing. I try to remember: what was it last? The house. The house I’d used for o. For the simulation of his stupid little life. I met him once, soft eyes and a sickeningly adorable smile. He’d work, I had thought. The doctor would fall in love with him easily. And of course - as with so many others - she would never suspect.

I remember the console room. Then, nothing. An endless expanse of nothing.   
Fitting. I remember the things I should forget but forget the things I should remember.  
In the distance, I can see a small figure in a clearing, one large eye. I check my pockets, but the tissue compression eliminator is gone. There’s a centaurian transport ship docked among the carcasses of rotting trees.   
The Centaurians notice my appearance - they scream and sound an alarm. And this once, just this once, I am tired of people being afraid of me. I wipe the blood from my lips.   
“Here’s what’s going to happen.”

-  
I’ll spare the details of the deaths, of the screaming, of the pain. I don’t think you’d like to hear.   
I enter the hull of the ship, and pull out the dead bodies. I open a cabinet filled with bleach, and pour some on the colorless ground. I clean the stains from the ground. I sweep and polish and scrub until the console room is pristine and smells like artificial lemons. 

I program the flight coordinates. Kepler 11-d, with 23-day years, or was it 23-year days? Does it matter? Orbiting a burning, fairly medium-sized sun, bombarded with comets. 

_And why aren’t comets larger than asteroids, koschei?_   
_Because they burn and shed trails of themselves._   
_And why do they burn?_   
_Because everything burns._

An eight-day flight plan. It shouldn’t be a while. I plug the tardis locator into the controls, and I wait.   
I scour the cabinets for sleeping devices, for anything that could drug me for the duration of the flight, but there’s nothing. Not a single colony pod, not a single packet of hypnotadryl, not a single bed in sight.

I lie on the ground, metal cold against my skin. I kick my shoes off.   
I’m tired. I’m so tired.  
I taste sleep, and sink into plush nothingness.

**Before**

  
“Koschei, can you hear me?”  
I open my eyes.   
“Yeah, I can hear you.”  
“Anyway, I was talking to borusa about failing temporal physics, and I realized that I would never pass the class.”  
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to look at him.   
His soft dirty-blonde waves, that idiotic sideways smile, ethreal brown eyes that twinkled in the gallifreyan sunlight.   
And his lips. His goddamned lips.   
I swear, those lips will be the end of me.   
“-- And that’s why I caught rallon and millennia making out in the hallway.”  
How do they taste, I wonder? How do they feel? Those soft, velvety lips? How would they feel pressed against my skin?  
“--Rassilon, the other, and omega had a series of sex tapes that were stored in the matrix.”  
I coughed. “what? They’re dead? And why?”   
“I was trying to get your attention, kos, you’re looking at me like you want to kill me.”  
Kill you? No. Wound you? Possibly.  
“Oh, sorry, keep going.”  
(I say sorry too much. Or too little. Either way, it can never be enough, can it?)

  
“Are you okay?”  
His tone is plastic, metal, faked. I dangle my legs off of the academy’s science building. I breathe in the air, and the smell of wildflowers.  
“I’m fine, theta.”  
Why wouldn’t I be?

\-- 

The time lord brain is infinitely superior to the human one. This is not a matter of opinion. Our brains are more developed, more complex, and capable of so much more.   
Imagine this: with a specific manipulation of one’s subconscious, it’s possible to imagine (physically, to almost feel) a dream. A thought. A wonder. A want.  
Imagine this: there’s a boy in a forest kissing another boy in the forest.   
Except there’s only one boy.   
And he’s not kissing the other one, he’s kissing the air, and the air tastes like earth-imported strawberries, tastes like cinnamon and copper, tastes like so many things that he can’t name.   
Imagine this: that boy is me. 

I lie on the ground, covered in leaves and genetically-conditioned ivy, next to a cracked plastic watering can.   
And ever so lightly, I can feel eight legs crawling up my arm.   
I scream, I scream until my voice is hoarse, and no one can hear me because it’s the middle of the fucking woods, because who would turn? Who would turn and kill the tiny, miniscule red thing? Who would stand there and not laugh?

I can hear the storm before it comes. Spasms shake me and I tremble violently, I can’t, I can’t breathe, I can’t do this, my skin is crawling with the memory of a thousand cellar spiders.   
I run. I don’t know how I manage to do this. I run and I run and I don’t stop. My shoes fall off and I cut my feet on the undergrowth, footprints stained with blood. I tear my mother’s sweater on the branches, and my face is bruised and scratched from the thorns, from the bushes, from the trees-

I throw my weight against the door and it gives, opening as I crash into the rug, shivering.

“Koschei?”  
Millenia peers out of her dorm room, dyed-blue curly hair and dark skin against the blue of the walls.  
“You good?”

I didn’t know I could cry this much without having drunk any water.  
A moment later, she’s out of the room, sitting next to me.   
“Would a hug help?”  
“Try it.”  
My tears drench my robe, and she holds me. “you’re going to be okay.”  
Stop saying that, I want to scream. I will never be okay.  
“If not indefinitely,” she whispers, “then sometime soon. For at least a little while.”

\----

The sun burns my eyes.   
I open them slowly, and the light leaks through my eyelashes like the corona of some faraway sun.  
If I die I think I’d like to drift aimlessly in orbit around one.  
But aren’t I already?

_(-Now, koschei, Here’s how to identify a star. You’ll need this for the academy. Look up there. See those tiny dots of light?_   
_Yes._   
_-If it twinkles, it’s a star. Next, observe the color._   
_Honey-blonde hair and soft-wheat skin._   
_Compare the relative brightness. Is it brighter than the dull, non-shimmering ones?_   
_He seems to emit light. He glows in the sun, idiotic-blue eyes shining brighter than anyone else’s._   
_Trace it. Does it move faster than the other stars? Is it orbiting something?_   
_The day he looks at someone like they are more than skin and bone? I don’t believe it’ll ever come. Will it?_   
_Koschei, you answered the question wrong. What happens when you get a question wrong?)_

I step out of the bunk, and look at him.   
He sleeps like an angel, an innocent smile draped across his face, soft-shaken curls pressed into the pillow.  
And I think - if theta stands in front of a flying bullet, there will be nothing, nothing anyone can do to stop me from absorbing the blow.  
Just for him to look at me like I am something more than myself.


End file.
